Pidgin: multi-protocol instant messaging
There are several instant messaging networks out there you can use for free. Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, and ICQ are some popular ones. What’s kind of annoying is that each of these networks does not allow messages to be sent to any of the others, so you have to sign up for each service separately, and install the required software, to be able to chat with your friends on each network.
To address this problem, there are a bunch of instant messaging clients that actually allow you to sign in to multiple instant messaging protocols at once. You still can’t, for example, send an IM from your Yahoo! Messenger account to one of your ICQ buddies, and you still have to sign up for each service, but once you have signed up and set up the application, you can see the status of all of your contacts at once. The first of these multi-IM clients that I heard of was Trillian, which comes in a free standard edition and a $25 professional version. The pro version has better video, support for skins, and some other niceties, but the free version is more than adequate for whatever I’m up to.
If you’re looking for free-free, the IM client I recommend is Pidgin. Pidgin supports all of the popular IM protocols (and some less popular):
- AIM
- Bonjour
- Gadu-Gadu
- Google Talk
- Groupwise
- ICQ
- IRC
- MSN
- MySpaceIM
- SILC
- SIMPLE
- Sametime
- XMPP
- Yahoo!
- Zephyr
Pidgin also supports plugins, so you can extend the functionality even further. I only use a couple of these: Facebook IM, which lets you chat with your Facebook friends without logging on to the site, and Microblog, which lets me update my Twitter status (I don’t really use this one very often). There are plenty more that I might check out, like the Guifications notification plugin and the Last.FM plugin that shows info about what songs I’m listing to.
Pidgin runs very nicely on Windows, and if you’re in to that sort of thing, it also runs on Linux and Unix (but not Mac OS X). Pidgin is also updated frequently, so there are always new features popping up.
Other Options
I haven’t used them much myself, but a couple of other multi-protocol IM clients I’ve heard a lot of great things about are:
- Digsby, which is Windows-only but packed with features such as built in email notifications and social network notifications; and
- Miranda IM, which also supports a wide array of protocols, and has more than 350 plugins, lots more than Pidgin.
At the end of the day, these free alternatives will give you plenty of features and customization options to keep you connected.
